#naturalism

It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design. ↗

— Robert J. Sawyer

#chance #coincidenc-e #fine-tuning #id #intelligent-design

Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it? ↗

— Stephen Crane

#humor #naturalism #nature

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#fact #naturalism #reliable #true #nature

Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are too primitive, too infantile, too inconsistent with themselves to be satisfied even by the greatest license. ↗

— John Desmond Bernal

#because #even #failed #full #giving

If modernist naturalism were true, there would be no objective truth outside of science. In that case right and wrong would be a matter of cultural preference, or political power, and the power already available to modernists ideologies would be overwhelming. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#available #case #cultural #ideologies #matter

I am really not of the school of naturalism. I like style, and you can use more style in theater than in film roles. I love to sink my teeth into a part. ↗

— Marisa Tomei

#film #i #i am #i love #into

The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed. ↗

— Michael J. Behe

#chance #darwinism #evolution #id #intelligent-design

Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic. ↗

— Hu Shih

#already #ancient #another #china #early

Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable. I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#experience

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process. ↗

— William A. Dembski

#chance #coincidence #consciousness #darwinism #evolution